Customers often interact with one or more agents of a company to meet a desired need or goal. Customers can interact with sales agents to learn about and purchase one or more services or products. Customers may interact with agents to obtain answers to questions. In the field of insurance, customers may interact with agents as part of an insurance claim process. Moreover, different interactions may take place over different kinds of communication modes. Interactions can occur over the phone, by email or by text, for example.
Agents may use tools to facilitate customer interactions. Some of these tools may be provided as part of a customer relationship management (CMR) software package. However, CMR software and related tools are often customized for a particular task or communication mode. An agent may need to manually initiate one set of processes for interactions that take place over the phone, and another set of processes for interactions that take place through a chat-based service.
In addition, each customer interaction is treated as an individual event with little to no context. For each new interaction, access to information about previous interactions with the customer may be limited or completely unavailable. This may result in a sense of discontinuity and frustration for a customer who may need to re-explain something to different agents at different times, and may also prevent the company from observing a larger context within which customer information, including preferences and other trends, may be visible.
There is a need in the art for a system and method that addresses the shortcomings discussed above.